James Webb space telescope has discovered hitherto unknown early galaxies including one that may have formed just 350million years after the big bang.
Associated Press reports that the project cost around $10billion – the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space – and “is in a solar orbit 1m miles (1.6m km) from Earth.”
According to NASA astronomers who were involved in the study, if the results are verified, “the newly discovered throng of stars would beat the most distant galaxy identified by the Hubble space telescope – a record-holder that formed 400m years after the universe began.”
Webb’s latest discoveries, as per Associated Press, “were detailed in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The article, the news agency says, elaborates on two exceptionally bright galaxies, the first thought to have formed 350m years after the big bang and the other 450m years after.
NASA scientists argued recently that “although some researchers report having uncovered galaxies even closer to the creation of the universe 13.8bn years ago, those candidates have yet to be verified.”
Garth Illingworth from the University of California, Santa Cruz and co-author of the article said: “This is a very dynamic time…there have been lots of preliminary announcements of even earlier galaxies, and we’re still trying to sort out as a community which ones of those are likely to be real.”
In addition, Tommaso Treu of the University of California and a chief scientist for Webb’s early release science program, suggested that “the evidence presented so far is as solid as it gets for the galaxy believed to have formed 350m after the big bang.”